HubSpot AEO in Marketing Hub: Complete Guide

HubSpot AEO allows companies to measure and optimize their brand performance in artificial intelligence-generated search environments. Unlike SEO, AEO emphasizes such aspects as artificial intelligence visibility, brand mentions, citations, search prompts, and competitors.

This guide gives you an overview of  HubSpot’s new AEO  in Marketing Hub and how it differs from SEO, how you can configure and use HubSpot AEO solution, what metrics are measured in this tool, and how much it is gonna cost you.. If you've never heard about AEO before or if you already use HubSpot, this guide will explain everything you need to know about AEO within your overall SEO strategy.

What Is HubSpot AEO?

HubSpot AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) is a set of tools and features designed to help businesses monitor and improve their visibility in AI-powered search experiences. As users increasingly ask platforms such as ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and Perplexity for direct answers, businesses need to understand not only where their website ranks but also whether their brand is mentioned, recommended, or cited in AI-generated responses.

HubSpot AEO assists marketers in determining how their brand fares for particular search prompts and how to enhance their brand’s presence on AI search engines. Unlike traditional keyword and ranking strategies, AEO offers information regarding AI visibility, brand mentions, citations, competition, and the prompts used by AI to produce particular answers about a business.

While a traditional SEO approach would involve targeting a query like “best CRM for small businesses,” an AEO approach would involve determining whether the AI search engines mention a business name when a user poses a question of this nature.

AEO vs SEO: What's the Difference?

Though Answer Engine Optimization and Search Engine Optimization share the same goals, they differ in terms of their areas of focus when it comes to search. Search Engine Optimization focuses on making a site visible in the search engine results, whereas AEO works to increase the probability that your brand/content will be cited in the answers generated by AI.

With search engines now offering direct answers via tools like AI Overviews, and users now relying more on platforms such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity to find answers, it is crucial for companies to adopt both methods for their searches.

AEO vs. SEO: Key Differences

How SEO and AEO Work Together

SEO does not make AEO redundant. On the contrary, good SEO can enable good AEO. Good content, good technical website performance, topical authority, information architecture, and reputable external sources can all help search and AI algorithms comprehend the content of a particular brand.

For instance, a business can leverage SEO to rank its detailed how-to guide as an answer to "Best CRM for Small Businesses". The AEO strategy will then target the extent to which the guide, brand, or sources of information are used in answering the same question via an AI-powered experience.

What makes the difference between SEO and AEO is the nature of the visibility destination. SEO strives to achieve visibility that leads to discovering and clicking through to the website, whereas AEO seeks to make a brand or content visible enough to feature in the answer itself.

Summing up, SEO allows for competing in rankings, whereas AEO enables competition for becoming part of AI-generated answers. Combining the two provides a more diverse way to tackle search visibility issues.

What Does HubSpot AEO Track?

How does your brand appear in AI-generated answers? What is the key factor behind this visibility? HubSpot AEO helps you answer these questions. Instead of looking at search rankings alone, HubSpot AEO monitors brand visibility in the AI search engines that it supports, measures relevant prompts for the business, citation analysis, competitor analysis, and recommends actions to improve visibility. HubSpot AEO presently supports ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity AI search engines.

1. Brand Visibility

Brand visibility score is among the top indicators monitored by the HubSpot AEO feature. It refers to the frequency with which the name of your brand appears in the answers and responses provided by artificial intelligence like Chatgpt, Perplexity, Claudi among others to the topics and prompts you are monitoring.

This metric is used by marketers to assess whether their brand is visible to consumers making inquiries through AI-based search engines. The best part about the tool is that it allows for tracking visibility in real-time.

2. AI Search Prompts

The AEO from HubSpot captures the actual questions/prompts utilized for assessing the visibility of your brand. You get to choose your own questions, although HubSpot is also capable of suggesting prompts for you considering your company, your competitors, your industry, and (if applicable) your CRM information.

For example, a Salesforce consulting company might track prompts such as:

• "What are the best Salesforce consulting companies?"
• "Best Salesforce implementation partner for a mid-sized business"
• "Salesforce consultants in India"
• "Which company can help with Salesforce integration?"

Tracking these prompts helps you understand where your brand appears, where competitors appear instead, and which customer questions represent visibility gaps.

3. Competitor Visibility and Share of Voice

The HubSpot AEO tool also helps in evaluating how your competition appears on the same prompts. This analysis includes a full competitive analysis which highlights your brand visibility as well as your competitors, which also determines how frequently and regularly your brand is being talked about relative to the competing brands on various AI tools.

This can reveal situations where:

• Your competitors are consistently recommended but your brand is absent.
• A competitor receives more AI mentions for an important prompt.
• Your brand has strong visibility for some topics but weak visibility for others.
• Certain sources appear to be contributing to a competitor's visibility.

This makes competitor tracking useful for identifying areas where your content and brand authority may need improvement.

4. Citations and Sources

Via citation analysis, we see what domains, pages, URLs, and content types are referred to in AI answers. With HubSpot, you can find out if your AI content is referencing your website, your competitor’s site, a third-party publication, social media, user-generated content, and more.

This is particularly valuable because it answers an important AEO question:

"What sources are influencing the answers AI gives about my industry?"

In case the citations are coming regularly from your competitors while your own content is ignored, it can be used to know what type of content you need to create and promote.

5. Brand Sentiment

Besides, HubSpot also analyzes the sentiment expressed in brand mentions in AI answers. They can be classified into positive, neutral, and negative, providing marketers with more information besides the fact that their brand was mentioned.

Thus, being mentioned often in AI answers is important, however, it is even more crucial to see how your company is described by AI. Your brand can have high visibility, but you should take care of its reputation and correct any wrong or outdated impressions.

6. AI Referral and Demand Signals

Where the company is using AEO in combination with HubSpot's larger marketing ecosystem, AI visibility can also be linked to marketing and referral data. This allows marketers to go beyond the metrics of visibility and assess whether the use of AI-based discovery is driving traffic, leads, and ultimately sales.

The importance of this distinction comes from the fact that being cited by the AI platform does not necessarily mean being in business. Monitoring engagement levels downstream allows companies to gauge what is driving their marketing success.

7. AEO Recommendations

Unlike many other systems, HubSpot not only gathers visibility data but also analyzes it and makes recommendations based on the gathered information. These recommendations can range from producing new content to updating current pages and social content and even from third-party sources for better visibility in AI.

This creates a simple workflow:

Track → Identify gaps → Get recommendations → Optimize → Monitor changes

In general, HubSpot AEO not only measures the presence of your brand in AI searches but also provides insight into the visibility of your brand, triggers mentions, the comparison with other brands, sources that contribute to the responses of AI, the way your brand is represented, and how you can enhance your visibility.

HubSpot AEO Use Cases

HubSpot AEO is able to help businesses understand how their brand is seen within AI generated answers, determine the visibility gaps, and create opportunities to improve visibility within AI searches.

Lead Generation (B2B): B2B firms can measure customer queries and evaluate the presence of their brand in high-intent search queries. It will enhance visibility during research and the vendor shortlisting phase.

SaaS Firms: SaaS companies can measure AI queries on software comparisons, features, alternatives, and solutions. The findings can be helpful in crafting content on customer queries.

E-commerce Firms: E-commerce brands can check the presence of their products or brand in the AI-generated recommendations and comparisons.

Agencies: Agencies can use HubSpot AEO to check their own and their clients’ visibility on AI, competition on AI, citations and content opportunities.

Professional Services: Firms that provide consulting, IT services, legal, or other professional services can monitor whether AI knows about their competences and suggests their services for industry-related questions.

Local Businesses: Local businesses can check AI-based prompts such as suggestions of certain services/providers within the business’s location and compete with their local competitors on visibility.

Enterprise Brands: Enterprises have visibility of the AI visibility across multiple products, markets and competition enabling marketing teams to identify and prioritize gaps in visibility.

Content Marketing Teams: The content marketing team can leverage the information provided by AEO to know the questions asked by the customers, references used by AI and where there is a need for new content.

Conclusion

As AI-enabled searches evolve to offer users new ways of obtaining information about products and services, AEO has become increasingly relevant as a component of the digital marketing strategy. HubSpot AEO allows enterprises to evaluate their visibility on AI searches, monitor brand mentions and citations, benchmark against their competition, and look for ways to enhance their presence in AI-generated answers.

Nevertheless, AEO should not be considered an alternative to SEO. The best option is to combine SEO with quality content creation, brand authority, and AEO.

Would you like to know about how you can integrate AEO into your existing strategies in HubSpot and digital marketing? Dean Infotech can help. Having considerable experience in integrating and implementing HubSpot and other CRM integration services along with digital transformation services, Dean Infotech can help you in designing your strategies.

Need to optimize your AI search visibility? Contact Dean Infotech to get your customized HubSpot AEO strategy!